Posted on 12/24/2006 12:45:17 PM PST by DeaconBenjamin2
December 21, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Nearly every week in the month of December features a key date in the history of the Soviet collapse. This year, which marks the 15th anniversary of the death of the USSR, finds some in Russia looking back wistfully as there seems to be a rise in historical revanche.
The last days of the Soviet Union began on December 8, 1991, when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus announced that the USSR had "ceased to exist as a geopolitical reality."
They culminated on December 31 -- a week after the resignation of the first and last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev -- when the Soviet flag was lowered at the Kremlin for the final time.
Spinning History?
The tumultuous course that Russia has followed ever since has generated, perhaps inevitably, a fervent desire among some to recast the past in a rosy hue.
The shelves of Moscow bookstores are stuffed with more than 500 new books on the life of the Josef Stalin; more than half of them are apologist in tone.
In recent weeks, national television networks have aired two films on the life of Leonid Brezhnev that depict the "stagnation" leader as a genial, sympathetic patriarch with a penchant for mocking his political advisers.
Even more startling has been the public rehabilitation of the Soviet-era intelligence and secret political police, the KGB. Authorities in the city of Tver recently unveiled a monument to former Chekists.
On December 8, the KGB's successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), launched for the first time in the country's post-Soviet history a series of awards recognizing literary and artistic achievement in works depicting the agency and its work.
Soviet Symbols
The awards are modeled on similar KGB prizes which from 1978-1989 rewarded artists for the "creation of a positive Chekist image."
Another sign of the times is the resurgent Cold War antagonism toward the West in general, and the United States in particular. It's a mind-set that appears to captivate nationalist-patriots, centrists, and liberals alike. It has become fashionable in Russia to accuse the West of Russophobia.
Mikhail Leontiyev, the Kremlin-friendly commentator for Channel One television, recently repeated a phrase attributed to former presidential chief of staff Aleksandr Leontiyev: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over" -- so much so, the reasoning apparently went, that they are incapable of understanding that Russia has changed.
The occasion of the 15th anniversary of the USSR's collapse has also sent into overdrive efforts to revise the Soviet legacy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin led the charge in his 2005 state-of-the-nation address, during which he called the demise of the Soviet Union "the great geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."
This year, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov referred to the collapse as "a mistake that could have been avoided."
'Cultural Counterrevolution'
Vladimir Zhirinovksy -- the outspoken deputy speaker of the State Duma who can usually be relied on to put the Kremlin's thoughts into words -- predicted that in the next decade, Russia would create a new Soviet Union. "There will be no 25th anniversary of the disintegration of the USSR," he told a television talk show.
Nostalgia for the Soviet Union -- as well as for tsarist Russia -- is only one element of the gigantic "cultural counterrevolution" that has marked Putin's presidency. The rise in nationalist and pro-imperial sentiment has gained currency in Russia, as has the mockery of Western liberal values.
The main contributors to this process are a massive and aggressive propaganda campaign eagerly advanced by the national television networks; the Russian Orthodox Church; pro-Kremlin intellectuals, and the myriad quasi-civic and youth organizations created by the presidential administration.
In such an atmosphere, it's hardly surprising that many polls show the majority of Russians expressing regret about the decline of the Soviet Union and even desiring its resurrection together with other former Soviet republics.
Even the theories explaining the Soviet collapse are beginning to evolve. Until recently, there were two popular justifications.
The first, liberal, rationale: The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution wrenched Russia off the road of natural progress and civilization. The democratic trends that emerged after 1991 returned the country to that road, and Russia is continuing the journey, albeit with great difficulties.
The second, national-patriotic, version: The Soviet Union collapsed because of a plot between Western intelligence agencies and traitors among the Soviet nomenklatura. If such a plot had never been devised, the argument goes, the Soviet Union would still exist.
Reasons For The Collapse
Both interpretations, however, betray the Soviet system as inherently weak and inefficient. They also both dwarf the role of the KGB, which was created to guarantee the power of the Communist Party but ultimately failed in its task.
In 2006, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) released a fresh volume of its history, including an analysis of the Soviet collapse. The SVR dismisses the theory that the death of the USSR was historically predetermined. Instead, it depicts the downfall as a chance combination of adverse historical circumstances and the "failed policy" of Gorbachev.
The study notes efforts by the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the American intelligence community to weaken the USSR during the final stages of the Cold War. These efforts included the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative -- better known as "Star Wars" -- that aimed at exhausting the Soviet economy by setting a new bar in military and defense parity. They also included restrictions of exports of Western hi-tech to Russia, the fall in oil prices, and U.S. support to anti-Soviet operations in Poland and Afghanistan.
But, in the view of SVR analysts, it was neither Reagan's strategy nor special operations by the CIA that created the crisis in the Soviet system. In the words of the report, it only "aggravated" it.
This conclusion was recently echoed by former KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. In a December 14 interview with "Izvestiya," Kryuchkov revealed that he had been warned about the possible collapse of the USSR by his U.S. counterparts. In 1987, he said, he met with Robert Gates, the future CIA director (and current defense secretary), who asked him if he was concerned about the possible disintegration of the USSR.
"I believe that Americans at that time already realized that because of our policy...we would ruin [the USSR] even without their help," Kryuchkov said.
Holy Polonium Batman! Did the USSR actually go away?
It shrinked a bit and changed it's name and flag. Few things have changed.
I don't know anyone who would argue that nothing has changed since 1991. However, there are extensive arguments whether the raison d'etre of Putin's presidency is the re-establishment of the Soviet Union.
What's next? Nostalgia for the Black Plague?
Putin is seeming more like a Czar than president
I sure hope not!
Do you think this is the US government's position?
BTW, there's even a warm, fuzzy feeling for the Stalin years in Russia- a nation with a severe global sociopathy.
You need to compare him with Yeltsin who sent tanks against Russian legislature to advance free market policies (in 1993).
If USA Congress were massacred in the name of free market and free trade and it was followed by impoverishment of majority and death of millions of people (the life span in Russia fell by several years to the same effect) what would be the reaction?
If USA Congress were massacred in the name of free market and free trade and it was followed by impoverishment of majority and death of millions of people (the life span in Russia fell by several years to the same effect) what would be the reaction?
Communism, from the time Lenin came to power, has always been more totalitarian in Russia than under the czar.
Since the commies and kegebuns are not humans but beasts in human shape, the legislature packed with them did not deserve any better.
Oh, I don't know- let's ask the Ukrainians.
The years during which the Russian Federation was the USSR, following the history of the Czarist regimes which preceded it, all have a common thread - the nativist Russian xenophobia and suspicion, bordering on paranoia, that has always been part of the Russian psyche. No matter WHAT government may have been in charge in Russia during the 20th Century, or the 19th Century, or the 21st Century, they always saw themselves as the competitors of the US, and deadly enemies of Germany.
The US may at times have had temporary alliances with Russians, but that is the controlling trait - temporary.
This was the same Duma that helped Yeltsin to fight Communist coup a couple years earlier. Shock "therapy" was not popular and caused immense damage. Do you support massacring MPs (of whom majority was not Communist).
I was looking at the geopolitical picture, not the state of society within Russia. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (as well as many of the Warsaw Pact/Soviet satellites) are in NATO and the EU. The Central Asian 'Stans have US bases (at least for now), and pipelines are being built so their natural gas and crude oil can bypass Russia. I'm not aware of any Russian military bases outside pre-91 Soviet borders. And Russia has its hands full retaining Siberia.
It was post WWII Soviet Union that was a competitor of USA. Before Bolshevik takeover the USA/Russia relationships were good. The only exception when both nations were on the opposing sides was during Napoleonic wars when British were allied with Russians and America was fighting British.
The only time when Russia and Germany were enemies was WWI and WWII. USA was on the same side as Russia. Have you forgotten?
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